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WITandWISDOM(tm) - August 24, 2004 ISSN 1538-8794 ~~~~~~~ THOUGHTS: "He's no failure. He's not dead yet!" - William Lloyd George Source: The Funnies, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/andychaps_the-funnies ~~~~~~~ SPECIAL THOUGHTS: Adapted from Ben Stein's Last Column... I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to. How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer. A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq . He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world. A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him. A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad. The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists. We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die. I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject. There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament....the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive, The orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery, the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children, the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards. Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse. Now you have my idea of a real hero. By Ben Stein Submitted by Bill Bates ~~~~~~~ THIS & THAT: The computer swallowed Grandpa Yes honestly, its true. He pressed 'control' and 'enter' And disappeared from view. It's devoured him completely The thought just makes me squirm. Maybe he's caught a virus Or been eaten by a worm. I've searched through the recycle bin And files of every kind. I've even used the internet But nothing could I find. I asked Jeeves in desperation My searches to refine. The reply from him was negative Not a thing was found online. So, if someday in your 'InBox' My Grandpa you should see. Please 'Scan', 'Copy' and 'Paste' him In an e-mail back to me. Source: Monday Fodder mailto:dgaufaaa@iohk.com?subject=Subscribe_Monday_Fodder http://www.fishermansnet.com/monday-fodder/ ~~~~~~~ KEEP SMILING: "People who throw kisses are mighty hopelessly lazy." - Bob Hope Source: Top Greetings, http://www.top-greetings.com/ ~~~~~~~ TRIVIA: Photo Software Now Freeware They used to sell this program, but now it's free! If you have digital images, you should try out Picasa. Picasa allows you to edit, organize and share photos. It scans your computer for all of your digital images. Add keywords to each picture to help organize them. Edit your pictures by cropping, removing red-eye and enhancing the color and contrast. You can print or e-mail directly from the program. This program was recently bought by Google and is now free for the taking! To visit this site, go here: http://www.picasa.com/google/ Copyright 2004, The Kim Komando Show. All rights reserved. Kim Komando's Cool Site of the Day http://www.komando.com |